…since I wrote a new post, yet that timeframe is dwarfed by how long it took me to revisit what I’ll be talking about. Which, at the time of writing, has already happened over a year ago and… well, maybe that’s enough talk about time. We all know it’s flying by and that feeling of being trapped in a perpetual cycle of trying to catch up. If this blog post does only one thing for you, then I hope it’s reassuring you that it’s never too late to pick something up again, even after putting it down over two decades ago, like I did with this guy here:
A miniature soldier from a tabletop wargame called Warzone, bought in my teens, around mid to end of the 1990ies, when some friends and I thought we’d get into it. We did build a landscape of modular tiles and paint some of the minis, but ended up never playing it and at some point it was all scrapped or put into storage. I kept my minis in a jar, along with a friend’s, which he had left with me to paint for him before the plans to play war fell to the wayside. Sometimes throughout the years I’d stumble on the pile of small warriors, feeling a twitch to get one of them out and dress it up in a suit of glorious colour. I never did though, always thinking that I should rather spend my time on another endeavour, not something so purely a hobby. If I painted something, I might as well make it a study or original art I thought.
Fast forward to the present (last year’s present anyway), someone had just tweeted about getting into the hobby, his first time painting anything. He had acquired some Warhammer 40K minis (Another, much more popular wargame, which quite obviously “inspired” Warzone back in the 90s.) and showed me the colour scheme he had in mind for his Space Marines. He fired me on to join in and after refusing my prior impulses, I was primed to finally give one of the old minis its time in the spotlight.
Since I hadn’t come up with any scheme of my own yet and quite liked the one he presented, I chose to adapt it for my gunner. How fitting that a unit from what really amounted to a knock-off version of Warhammer 40K would be sporting one of their official squad colours. Even more amusing when you consider Warzone went out of production a long time ago.
Though I hadn’t painted a mini in ages, having to re-familiarize myself with brush control on a tiny scale, my progress as artist in other areas and the acquired skills and knowledge since my teens clearly enabled me to produce a much nicer paintjob than I would have been capable of back then. Which was something I expected, but what I did not expect was the amount of fun I had. So much so, that since finishing our little mohawk-wearing tough guy I’ve delved deeper into the hobby, looking at what our modern times have to offer when it comes to advancements in miniature designs and quality. But that will have to wait until another post. Which, if my plans don’t follow those of the olden tabletop wars, shouldn’t take too long this time around.
